A few months ago, I met a guy named Leonard Knight who’s spent the last 20 years building a folk art masterpiece called "Salvation Mountain." Leonard lives in the back of his pickup truck and usually sleeps under the stars. Visitors bring him food, paint, and minor donations, and Leonard continues to work on his adobe mountain and ~200 other folk art projects meant to convey the message that "God Loves Everyone." Leonard’s mountain has been likened to an epic work of folk art “comparable to the Watts Towers,” is entered it into the Congressional Record as a national treasure, and was also featured in the movie Into the Wild.

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2008) — Scientists have determined how to fortify the cassava plant, a staple root crop in many developing countries, with enough vitamins, minerals and protein to provide the poor and malnourished with a day's worth of nutrition in a single meal.

The Waterboard is an interactive installation by Mike Burton giving the user a chance to play with water without getting wet. By drawing lines on the whiteboard, the water will follow a different course. Abstract life forms may appear in basins and where the water is stagnant it will become turbid.

Remember the wind shaped pavilion? In Dubai they do it bigger. Architect David Fisher designed a skyscraper that rotates by wind power. Each floor rotates independently at different speeds, resulting in an ever changing shape that is not only spectacular but – with a wind turbine on every floor – should also be self-powered.

On the inside: Luxury penthouse villas, which will be over 1,000 square meters, will be completely custom-made to fulfill individual buyer’s personal needs, they will also include an indoor swimming pool, voice activated features, demotic control systems, built in phone system. Villa’s residents will have the possibility to drive directly into the building were a special elevator take their car to their floor and park at the entrance to their Villa’s.

You’ve got to see it to believe it. Although – as we write – construction is yet to start. The rotating tower is one of those structures to become famous already from their computer renderings. Seems to be a whole architectural category of its own nowadays. We call it image building… and Dubai is taking the lead.

UK: Government Asks Stores to Stockpile Food in Case of Infrastructure Breakdown
July 7th, 2008

Via: Times:

Ministers are in talks with supermarkets about emergency food reserves in case fuel protests lead to shortages at shops.

The government wants to ensure retailers and suppliers can continue to sell basics such as meat, bread and milk if hauliers bring the country to a halt.

They have asked supermarkets to make contingency plans “in case the infrastructure of the country breaks down”.

Among those who have taken part are farmers, dairies, bakeries and supermarkets.
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At least four government departments are involved. The operation is being led by Bruce Mann, director of civil contingencies at the Cabinet Office.

The government has commissioned IGD, a company that collects intelligence on international food and grocery chains, to supply data about how food is moved around the country and where stocks are held. The information has been used to put together a “map” of depots and supply lines.

The move comes as hauliers warn that direct action over soaring fuel prices is a “very strong possibility”.

Some complain that modern life contains too many artificial aspects: concrete instead of countryside, the internet instead of interaction, and all those sweeteners in our food. Just wait till they hear about the Japanese scientists who've rewritten DNA with entirely artificial basepairs.

Some complain that modern life contains too many artificial aspects: concrete instead of countryside, the internet instead of interaction, and all those sweeteners in our food. Just wait till they hear about the Japanese scientists who've rewritten DNA with entirely artificial basepairs.

Like avid travelers picking up local languages, migrating birds appear to learn and understand the common calls of unrelated bird species that they encounter during their long journeys, new research reveals.

WASHINGTON — The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues.

The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The vote came two and a half years after public disclosure of the wiretapping program set off a fierce national debate over the balance between protecting the country from another terrorist strike and ensuring civil liberties. The final outcome in Congress, which opponents of the surveillance measure had conceded for weeks, seemed almost anticlimactic in contrast.

He discovered the Virginia State Lottery was continuing to sell tickets for games in which the top prizes were no longer available. Public records showed that someone had already won the top prize one month before Hoover played. He is now suing the state of Virginia for breach of contract.

I love it .... problem is, breach of contract damages merely make you whole:

Another one for the annal of strange crime and an interesting one to write up on the arrest sheet: "Took into custody two 'trolls' who were extorting money with menaces from people trying to cross their bridge".

A man who acted as a modern-day bridge troll faces charges in Boulder after he and his companion allegedly got into a confrontation with an off-duty sheriff's deputy.

...

Police said that Hibbs insisted he was a troll and owned the bridge the deputy was trying to cross.

Witnesses told police that Hibbs and Bradley Boville, 19, were demanding $1 from joggers and bikers who attempted to cross the bridge.

The off-duty deputy, who was not identified, told police the confrontation with Hibbs started after the man hit his bike with a broken golf club when he forced his way past without paying. The two became involved in an altercation and Hibbs hit the deputy with a golf club, the police report stated. The deputy said he took the golf club away from Hibbs and struck him in an attempt to defend himself.

An explanation is easy to find:

Boville, who was with Hibbs, reportedly told police that they had consumed LSD and that Hibbs was having a bad trip.

Police said they confiscated a large marijuana joint rolled in $1 bills at the scene and then searched Boville's apartment and recovered drugs and drug paraphernalia.

Although if they were using dollar bills instead of Rizlas*, could we have stumbled across some uber-secret US government plan to turn people into trolls using a smokable ink (presumably one of the magic varieties we here so much about these days). Or it could be the LSD, stranger things have happened.

THE faint sound of crashing waves can travel across continents through Earth's rocks. Now it seems this ambient hum can be harnessed to help predict how destructive an earthquake will be.

Estimating the degree to which the ground will shake during a quake of a given magnitude is tricky because seismic waves can be muffled or amplified by geological structures en route from the epicentre, such as sedimentary basins.

According to Gregory Beroza and Germán Prieto of Stanford University in California, you can predict these effects using measurements of the ambient hum. They were able to see how the underlying geology affected waves travelling through the Earth's crust when they correlated measurements of the hum, taken near the town of Big Bear on the San Andreas fault, with corresponding readings at four seismic stations across Los Angeles.

Their analysis shows that seismic waves are trapped and amplified on this route, probably by a bowl of sedimentary rock under Los Angeles. That is borne out by a 2001 earthquake close to Big Bear with a magnitude of 4.6, which shook LA more intensely and for longer than it should have for its magnitude (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034428).

Researchers at MIT recently revealed a cutting-edge solar technology that promises a “tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by solar cells.” The development utilizes dye-glazed glass panels to capture and concentrate sunlight and then transfer it to an edge-aligned framework of photovoltaic cells. The resulting system uses cheap and readily available materials, is easy to manufacture, and modular systems can even be layered over existing photovoltaic systems to effectively double their energy efficiency for a minimal additional cost.

Remember the wind shaped pavilion? In Dubai they do it bigger. Architect David Fisher designed a skyscraper that rotates by wind power. Each floor rotates independently at different speeds, resulting in an ever changing shape that is not only spectacular but – with a wind turbine on every floor – should also be self-powered.

On the inside: Luxury penthouse villas, which will be over 1,000 square meters, will be completely custom-made to fulfill individual buyer’s personal needs, they will also include an indoor swimming pool, voice activated features, demotic control systems, built in phone system. Villa’s residents will have the possibility to drive directly into the building were a special elevator take their car to their floor and park at the entrance to their Villa’s.

You’ve got to see it to believe it. Although – as we write – construction is yet to start. The rotating tower is one of those structures to become famous already from their computer renderings. Seems to be a whole architectural category of its own nowadays. We call it image building… and Dubai is taking the lead.